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| Forcing Factors: (1) Solar (2) Orbit / Milankovitch cycle (3) Volcanism (4) Meteors (5) Plate Tectonics (6) Ocean Variability (7) Radiative forcing (8) Flora and Fauna
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Forcing Factors
What impacts the climate? Almost everything. The Earth's climate is constantly changing due to the following factors.
IN ORDER OF IMPORTANCE:
- ☀️Solar output
- 🌎variations in the Earths Orbit (Milankovitch cycles)
- 🌋Volcanism
- 🌠Meteorological events
- 🍽️Plate Tectonics
- 🌊Ocean Variability
- 🙍♂️Radiative forcing (the Greenhouse Effect is a small part of radiative forcing)
- 🙍♂️Flora and Fauna
Man (🙍♂️) only contributes a minuscule amount to the weakest two — and CO2 (⚛️) not only has a diminishing feedback effect, but there's great debate over counter-balancing effects of raising CO2, like: carbon sequestration, cloud albedo, and CO2 increases flora and fauna which increases CO2 scrubbing.
Ask yourself, if the earth wasn't a self-balancing system, then why didn't we cook-off in the last 4.5B years back when we had 10x or 20x the CO2 we have today?
Climate Forcing Factor Slides
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Climate Forcing Factors : 2 items
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- Radiative forcing is one of the weakest of the Forcing Factors impacting the Earth's climate.
- The Greenhouse Effect is a second weakest part of radiative forcing
- CO2 is a very small part of the greenhouse effect. How small? Mankind contributes 14Gt of the 22,056,773+ Gt of all greenhouse gasses in our system (about .0004%).
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The Milankovitch cycles are named after the Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch who observed/developed/published this in the 1930s. The observation is that the Earth wobbles around it's own axis, and the orbit is not concentric around the Sun (we get closer and further, at different times of the year). These are measured in:
- eccentricity: whether the Earth is orbiting nearly circular or elongated/elliptical. This cycle is affected by other planets in the solar system and has a period of around 100,000 years.
- obliquity: Rotational tilt of the Earth. A greater tilt makes the seasons more extreme. The angle of tilt of the earth’s axis changes from 22.1° to 24.5°. This cycle has a period of 41,000 years.
- The direction of the tilt of the axis changes (precession) on a cycle of 26,000 years.
- axial precession: the direction in the fixed stars pointed to by the Earth's axis, does change over time (axial precession)
- apsidal precession: the Earth's elliptical orbit around the Sun rotates.
The combined effect is that proximity to the Sun occurs during different astronomical seasons. Each of these factors has it's own timeline, and together they can combine to cause magnifying or nullifying effects on climate. This cycle has a far, FAR bigger impact to the Climate than CO2.
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